Monthly Archives: February 2017

I sat down to write a response to Evie Wild’s book Everything Is Teeth and the book barely surfaces. This became an essay about other things, but in a way, that’s my favorite kind of reaction essay. Something that becomes a seed for a different plant. I think this means that I liked the book.
Everything Is Teeth.
I can’t remember anything from when I was six. I don’t know what books I loved, what I was obsessed with. Time when I was young is one big chunk. I was young, then I wasn’t. I know that my mother created worlds for us– she read The Boxcar Children and Roald Dahl and enough sailing adventures of Arthur Ransome that I thought, years later, that I knew the feeling of a boat beneath my feet and it was only when a friend asked “when?” that I questioned my memory.
Memory is a faulty machine. I remember rain and green vines and my aunt from my vantage point at her knees, holding an umbrella above us. Stomping on mushrooms that puffed spores in to the forest. I don’t know if there was really an umbrella. I don’t remember anything before or after. Just rain, mushrooms, spores and my aunt.
With an adults perspective and a map, I can gather that we were on the Olympic peninsula. I can ask my aunt about the specifics, because I live here now, this place of first memory, a few miles from the very aunt that I can remember in laughter and shoes.
My brother swears he remembers the trip to Seattle. That he remembers sitting in a truck, pushing all the buttons. He was younger than me, still in diapers, barely a toddler, and he remembers this. Or he’s heard the story so many times and seen the photographs he has created this memory. The mind is powerful, we can create and destroy and convince ourselves our version is the right version. If only this were limited to sitting in a truck, pushing buttons.
How strange, when my mom and dad were separating, that he came back from seeing his brother with gifts for all of us. He rode horses and picked out earrings and left them on the ironing board. Why didn’t he hand them to her, why did he leave them on a place tied to chores and domesticity? I still love the earrings he gave me, even though one has broken. I treasure everything my father gave me. It doesn’t matter why. But the child never asks why something is the way it is. Shifts happen and there is a powerlessness to it. So you adapt.
What happens to the brother? Why is he bleeding and what happens to the family because of it? To a child, it is just the new reality. She questions briefly and then brings another shark story as a gift.
Maybe I just wasn’t as precocious as a child. A little shark wielding tooth wielding child. I was half of a unit, I had my twin sister by my side. What world did we create without even knowing? We never created our own language, we were never inseparable like some twins, going mute in public, becoming two parts of a whole that could not stand on her own. The older I get the more I realize how present a twin is. How there is never a question of thereness. And this terrifies me. I read stories of twinless twins, I burst in to tears when asked : Is your twin a) living b) deceased c) unknown. To be that far apart, to be uncertain whether or not she lived. Move on, do not investigate this any deeper.
There is a new moon tonight– a gaping sky. In class our yoga teacher tells us– there is a shift, have you felt it? The sky agape. A word that means mouth open, also selfless love. As we sit, teeth swim through me. Sutures tearing slightly open. Hands in fire mudras, burning creation. Memory is fallible, memory can be recreated. What I once looked at with tinges of heartbreak I can see with a different clarity. Cauterize and move on. Some people are not capable of understanding words have duplicity, meaning floats on the surface. The mouth hingeing open, the sky empty.

An attack becomes about sustenance, about self preservation. A shark moving in for fish at a weight belt, not for the man. He is a bystander, he got in the way. This doesn’t undo the damage. Intentions are irrelevant, but you can learn to be in a different place. To be cautious with movement.
In a memoir, there is no clean conclusion. It reminds me of the short stories from the magazine Story. All slice of life. As a reader they left me feeling raw, uncertain. Now I gravitate to this style. A death in the periphery, something that changes the story but is never in focus. The car driving away and the dishwasher that continues to churn while she sits at window, watching the mailman. No answers, nothing concluded. A slightly polished mirror held up– this is us, our world, and not everything will be explained. Take it.

Tonight was supposed to be an evening of catching up with friends and meeting new instructors with WAC. For reasons too much to get in to here, I had to skip the meet and greet. Not thrilled.

Rather than just stew at home angry, I took the time to work on my ever growing print project. Here are the results from a bit of wine and some sharp blades.

I knew this image was going to be too large for my format, but here is the starting point. I upped the contrast (hiding Dave completely) and reversed it for reference. This image is the reverse of the original.

Next I traced the block and sketched out the image in sharpie. I used to use a finer point, but the blunt tip of sharpies mimics the finest point of the blade I use better than a fine tip pen. Using the sketch, I redraw the image on the block. At this point I mostly avoid looking back at the source image. While it is useful, I will never get the fine detail in the photograph and referring back to it at this point is just frusrating.

Time to cut! I use linozip blades rather than the traditional ones that gouge out. I find I have more control with the j hook.

The final block- pre printing. Typically I test print with stamp ink first and make adjustments, but this block had enough relief that I felt pretty good about it and went right for the ink.

The final image. I will print it on better paper, but this is what I had on hand, and you can see the weave coming through.

Eventually I will print all the blocks on nice paper and bind them in to a book– that’s the long term goal at least. For now, this will do.

How fine the line between ownership and forceful takeover. This is my story but not mine alone. So where are the lines between mine and yours? This mug is mine. This bowl was yours but you gave it to me, so it is mine now. This stainless steel measuring cup was never mine but yours and I have taken it. These kitchen things. I stop buying things that are hand wash only so I can rein my anger at the dishwasher. On inanimate fight.

Karis, Dave and I plan to meet in Bangkok. My flight arrives slightly before his and Karis and I catch up while I sit on my bags outside the gate and we wait for him to arrive. Compared to Seattle, it is warm and muggy, and I’m jet lagged to the point of no longer being tired. Karis has been in Thailand for two weeks and has a better understanding of the place—she’s found us a hotel in Chinatown for the night and we’ll spend the next day wandering markets before leaving for Laos the following morning. The Chinese New Year is approaching and every market stall seems crammed with red lanterns and dresses.

It’s hard to explain Bangkok in any other way besides a sensory assault. It is loud and bright and smells like ten thousand things at once. It seems to be buildings forever, edged in black that is either mold or soot but either way adds to the density and the darkness. Morning is a slow fog and then the sun is up and the heat sets in. The markets are overwhelming and I’m glad we’re headed to a quieter place for the next few days.

On Monday morning we catch a cab from the hotel to the airport and head to Vientiane, Laos. From there we’ll take a bus down to Thakhek and a tuk tuk to the climbing camp. As the plane approaches the earth I can already tell we are far from a bustling city. Laos beneath us is a tangled jungle of green and bright red soil. We touch down in Vientiane and are ushered in to a cab and as he drives us to the airport everything seems slightly slower, slightly quieter. The architecture is different—and it feels European in a way that Bangkok didn’t. Everything is bright sunlight and dusty red and colorful paint.

Bus station in Vientiane

Party bus!

At the bus station we pay $10 USD a piece for our tickets and climb in to the brightly colored double decker. Our luggage is below and the seats fill up but it isn’t overly crowded. The ceiling is a multitude of colors, with panels that have lights imbedded like a party bus. We take off on the highway and careen towards Thakhek. Laos is a country full of houses and rubble—construction both in process and abandoned; it’s hard to tell what’s still in progress and what’s been left to the elements. As we pass by the huge houses there are people clustered around low tables and they barely look up at the bus on its shaky wheels. Occasionally there’s a person on the side of the road with a suitcase and we pull over for them to climb in. The highway is two lanes that is technically both directions but it’s hard to tell—the bus beeps frequently and veers around tuk tuks, scooters, anything moving slowly. Cows slowly cross at one point and the driver beeps frantically before swerving to avoid the barely reacting bovines.

By the time we make it to camp we’ve been on the road for around 7 hours, not including the flight and the tuk tuk we snagged from the bus stop in Thakhek. The driver blatantly over charges us and pulls in to a gas station with a grin to tell his friend before he steers back to the road and drives in to the darkness. Just as we’re starting to get nervous he might be taking us to a different place entirely he turns down a dirt road with a sign for Green Climbers Home. The driver stops at a cluster of buildings and points towards them and then holds out his hand. We pay and step over electrified wires. We walk toward the light of cabins looking for #62 but we can’t find numbers on anything. Karis turns and asks a woman leaving the main cabin/bar and she scoffs at us with a French accent “Camp #62? There’s no camp #62…” “Cabin 62?” “That’s the second camp. Down that road” and she points in to the darkness. We step back over the electric wire and follow a road in to the dark. I’m travel weary and moving through a country where I don’t speak the language is starting to limit my patience and grace—I’m angry that the woman wasn’t more helpful and that the email with direction to our cabin is hopelessly vague despite feeling so certain when we left Bangkok this morning. My headlamp is still in my bag and I follow the circles of Dave and Karis and try not to stumble.

Finally we come to second gate and a second set of cabins with another bar. The laughter here sounds softer, friendlier somehow. We find our cabin easily and ditch or bags before heading in to the main building. Inside we walk to the counter and are met with smiles but blank stares until Thomas, one of the camp employees, walks up to welcome us. He walks us through check in, gives us our key, explains the no-cash system of writing down what we take and order in our well-worn notebook. We order food and as we’re waiting, Tanja, one of the owners, walks over.

Tanja is smiling and friendly. Her warmth and welcome erases any of the frustrations of travel and by the time we tumble in to bed, new guidebook in hand, mosquito nettings unfurled, it feels like a little like home.

In the morning we walk over to the bar for breakfast and I am undone by the landscape rising around us. It is a tangle of jungle with black limestone jutting out of the ground. There are peaks around us that look entirely untouched and rotten and cliffs soaring that look like something melted but standing, like the inside of a cave without the dampness. We eat, fill up our water bottles, and walk towards our first climb.

Here are a few things you should know about Green Climbers Home. Any time you see Tanja, she will be smiling. The food is absolutely amazing and the people who work in the café are kind and patient. Everything is labeled. Every. Single. Climb. Maybe this is because it’s a relatively young area—established around 5 years ago. Maybe it’s because it’s closer to a European style crag than anything I’ve seen in the states. I don’t know, but each climb has the name written directly below the first bolt. All the climbs we try are very well bolted or slung and the guidebook is accurate with any corrections listed in the cafe. The slings are ropes through holes in the tufas and they seem in decent shape, though it is still a little unnerving to hear rock ping hollowly and to feel the vibration of a stalactite. The anchor system… is a work in progress. The initial anchors are two bolts with a loop of rope between and a belay ring on the lower bolt. The rope is the backup – but if the first bolt were to blow, the whole system would shock load. Some of the newer anchors had a third bolt that seemed to help… but it still felt a little sketchy. Finally – the rock is SHARP. More about this below.

We climb mostly single pitch with the exception of Chinese New Year, a 4 pitch climb that I would never repeat. The third pitch is the crux and is super fun climbing, but the final pitch feels like climbing to Mordor on jet black knife edges. The rock is sharp and jutting—while the climbing is relatively easy, it is a complete no-fall-zone. We summit at sunset and rappel down in the dark, crossing our fingers each time we pull from a rap and cheering when the rope comes back down to us. We snag a few times but manage to finesse the rope loose—any sharp tug feels like we’ll snap right through the sheath and core. My Achilles are both aching incredibly and I know I’m pretty much toast for the rest of the trip.

Sunset summit of Chinese New Year.

Dave crushing it

Thursday morning we check out and leave our bags in the gear storage. It’s sunny and beautiful and instead of climbing I’m moving in ways to be in less pain. My finger pads are shredded and my Achilles is screaming. I switch to photographer and David and Karis climb rock that looks like a playground and feels, to me, like broken glass. They finish the day on a new route that is labelled but not in the guidebook, complete with a ladder start. Then its lunch and a cab ride back in to Thakhek. We find a hotel along the water and watch the sun set over the Mekong. The next morning we head back in to Bangkok with so much left unclimbed and so many things unexplored. I want to go back, and I want to do it differently, but that’s the way I feel about almost every place I’ve been, and I think that’s a good thing. So—who wants to go to Laos with me in 2018?